Adventures in CLI

The command line interface is a feature of operating systems and some applications where you key commands rather than choosing them from some menu or launching an icon in a GUI environment.

It is a feature of my favorite families of operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Debian, and so forth and I utilize them because they break the chain of GUI addicts who cannot function in the old style in which I was initially trained whereby you entered the command and verified it prior to pressing the ENTER key which resulted in immediate execution.

I'd like to take this opportunity to reiteriate my opinion that all of these operating systems are "Unix based" even though colleagues may disagree calling "Debian" some entity of it's own design.

However, the parallel command structure begs to differ and I retain my view on the matter.

Terminal operations were once part and parcel to the utilization of computers which were large complicated machines requiring rooms full of equipment and resulting in much less computational power than many find on their desk tops these days.

My origins are in the 8 bit region on the PDP series of Digital Equipment Corporation machines with proprietary hardware peripherals and wire wrapped interface cards which occupied a "backplane" which too was a separate piece of hardware:

PDP-8, PDP-11/23, PDP-11/73, MicroVAX

I miss the old days of text based everything for it's simplicity. The advent of graphics on Unix boxes was a treat indeed, but nowadays I save the GUI stuff for windoze and stay at the command line on Unix based servers which are innocent of a single graphical module.

Servers really don't need the overhead of the GUI environment which I feel is a pitfall of the entire windoze line ...

The power of Unix and operating systems like them lay in the command line, accessed by a program called "terminal" or a "terminal emulator" running on a client to that host.

Errant commands could once be catastrophic, and indeed they may still be. However, if you know what you're doing prior to pressing that ENTER key you should be able to predict the results of any command.

Contrast this with my young nephew who once told me that a computer was "broken" because the mouse wouldn't operate therefore rendering the entire machine "unusable". I simply hit the keyboard and entered those shortcuts which enabled me to shut down the machine. I then reseated the mouse connection (which was PS/2 and therefore not a "hot swap" device) whereupon the entire machine automagically began "working" again.

The sophistication of too many users has become obscured by a company which would enslave everyone with few people challenging the environment or the company's ability to deliver a product ready for market.